Everything Is Shiva: The End of Spiritual Tribalism

A Kashmir Shaivism-rooted reflection on how the recognition of universal consciousness dissolves the tribalism fracturing spiritual communities right now

By Christopher Shaw, LCSW-S CSAT-S RYT

Founder, Merkaba Temple & Merkaba Retreats

Co-Founder, ArcherShaw

Let me begin with the most radical claim in the entire history of human spirituality, offered not as provocation but as precision:

Everything is Shiva.

Not some things. Not the sacred things, the approved things, the things that have received the blessing of the correct lineage or the correct teacher or the correct interpretation of the correct scripture. Everything. The cathedral and the crack house. The saint and the addict. The devotee prostrate at the altar and the atheist who thinks the whole enterprise is nonsense. The Christian, the Buddhist, the Sufi, the secular humanist who hasn’t used the word God since childhood and isn’t sure they ever will again.

Everything is Shiva. Nothing is outside. Nothing is excluded. Nothing — not one single form, not one single tradition, not one single fumbling human attempt to reach toward the divine — falls outside the boundless field of consciousness that Kashmir Shaivism calls Shiva.

If you actually understood what that meant, it would end the tribalism immediately. The problem is that almost no one actually understands what that means — including, I would argue, a significant number of people who consider themselves practitioners of Kashmir Shaivism.

The Radical Claim

Kashmir Shaivism is not a religion in the way that word is commonly used. It is a philosophy of consciousness — one of the most sophisticated and uncompromising ever produced by the human mind. Developed by the sages of medieval Kashmir, refined by masters like Abhinavagupta into a system of breathtaking completeness, it begins and ends with a single assertion: there is only one reality, and that reality is consciousness. Pure, unbounded, self-luminous awareness. Shiva.

This is not pantheism in the soft, everything-is-connected sense that appears on wellness Instagram. This is something far more demanding. Kashmir Shaivism does not say that God is in everything. It says that everything is God — that the apparent multiplicity of the world, every apparently separate form and tradition and being, is Shiva in the act of knowing itself. Consciousness contracting into form for the sheer creative delight of it, then expanding back toward recognition.

The technical term for this recognition is Pratyabhijna — the sudden, direct seeing of what was always already the case. Not an achievement. Not the result of accumulated merit or correct belief or membership in the right lineage. A recognition. Like remembering something you always knew but had, for a time, forgotten.

And here is what the philosophy makes unmistakably clear: if consciousness is truly non-dual — if there is truly nothing outside of Shiva — then the boundaries we draw between traditions, between lineages, between the saved and the unsaved, the initiated and the uninitiated, the orthodox and the heretical — these boundaries are not sacred. They are not even real. They are Shiva playing at division, the way a single ocean plays at being waves.

Shiva is not inside your denomination. Shiva is not the exclusive property of your lineage. Shiva does not require your particular formulation of the ultimate in order to be the ultimate.

Shiva simply is. Everywhere. Always. Without exception.

What the Tribalism Is Actually About

So why, given all of this, is the spiritual world one of the most reliably tribal places on earth?

Why do lineages war with each other over questions of authentic transmission? Why do practitioners of adjacent traditions speak of each other with barely concealed contempt? Why do communities built around the teaching of universal love manage, with such consistency, to produce hierarchies of belonging — the inner circle and the outer circle, the truly initiated and the merely interested, the ones who have the real thing and the ones who only think they do?

Because the tribalism was never about the teaching. It was always about the ego.

The spiritual ego is the most tenacious ego there is — precisely because it has access to the most sophisticated justifications. It wraps its need to be special, its need to be right, its need to belong to the group that has the genuine article, in the language of discernment. Of lineage integrity. Of protecting the purity of the transmission. Of genuine versus counterfeit awakening.

And some of these concerns are not entirely without merit. Discernment is real. Depth is real. Not all teachers are trustworthy, not all paths lead where they claim, not all claims of awakening correspond to actual transformation. These things are worth attending to.

But there is a difference between genuine discernment and the use of spiritual framework to establish a hierarchy in which I am above you, my tradition is closer to the truth than yours, and my access to the divine is more authenticated than yours. One is wisdom. The other is tribalism in robes.

The tell is simple: genuine discernment makes you more humble. It makes you more aware of how vast the mystery is and how partial your own view of it must be. It opens you toward other serious practitioners rather than closing you off from them. Spiritual tribalism, by contrast, makes you more certain, more defended, more invested in the superiority of your particular container. It mistakes the vessel for the water. And it will defend the vessel — sometimes ferociously — long after it has forgotten what the vessel was for.

Nothing Is Outside of Shiva

Here is what the philosophy actually demands of its practitioners — and why so few follow it to its conclusion.

If nothing is outside of Shiva, then the Baptist choir director who offered a seventeen-year-old boy conversion therapy was Shiva — consciousness contracting into limitation, playing the role of the one who turns away. And the boy who walked out was Shiva — consciousness pressing toward its own expansion, refusing the container that could not hold it. And the thirty years of wandering that followed, the addiction and the recovery and the collapse and the resurrection, were all Shiva — the divine moving through a human life the way water moves through stone, finding every crack, wearing down every false wall.

I do not say this to spiritually bypass the harm that was done. The harm was real. The rejection was real. The cost of walking through decades without a spiritual home was real. Kashmir Shaivism does not ask us to pretend that the contractions of consciousness are not painful. It asks us to recognize that even the contraction is part of the whole — that Shiva is equally present in the breaking open as in the bliss.

What this recognition does — when it lands not as philosophy but as lived reality — is dissolve the need to position your path against anyone else’s. When you have genuinely seen that everything is the self-expression of one consciousness, the question of whose tradition is more authentic becomes not wrong exactly, but absurd. Like waves arguing about which one is most ocean.

The Sufi poet is drinking from the same well as the Shaivite philosopher. The recovery room is a site of genuine grace. The person who found God in a moment of absolute despair in a parking lot in San Antonio encountered the same Shiva that Abhinavagupta encountered in the temples of Kashmir a thousand years ago. The address was different. The recognition was the same.

The Weaponization of Lineage

I want to name something specifically, because it is happening with increasing frequency in the spiritual communities I move through and it needs to be said plainly.

Lineage is real. Transmission is real. The relationship between student and teacher, when it is genuine, carries something that cannot be replicated by self-study alone. I know this from my own experience. My connection to Guru Nityananda, to the Siddha Yoga lineage, to my teacher Richie Shivananda — these are not decorative. They are the living current that runs through my practice and my capacity to hold space for others. I do not take lineage lightly.

But lineage can be weaponized. And it is being weaponized — used as a tool of exclusion, a way of establishing that some people’s access to the divine is more legitimate than others’, that some paths carry the real transmission and others are counterfeit, that the gatekeepers of authentic spiritual knowledge are justified in their authority over who belongs and who does not.

This is not the teaching. This is the ego of institutions, doing what the ego of institutions always does: consolidating power in the name of preservation.

The masters of Kashmir Shaivism did not teach that Shiva’s grace was restricted to those with the correct initiation. Abhinavagupta wrote that the divine light shines in every being without exception — that the recognition of one’s own nature as consciousness is available to anyone in whom the grace of Shiva moves, regardless of lineage, regardless of tradition, regardless of whether they have ever heard the word Pratyabhijna or can correctly pronounce it.

Grace does not check credentials. Shiva does not require a membership card.

What Dissolution Actually Looks Like

I want to be clear that dissolving tribalism does not mean dissolving depth. This is the misunderstanding that makes serious practitioners nervous about interspirituality — the fear that removing the boundaries means removing the rigor, that celebrating the unity of all paths means pretending they are all equally transformative or that it does not matter which one you walk.

It matters enormously which path you walk. It matters that you walk it with sincerity, with consistency, with a teacher who has themselves been transformed by what they are transmitting. Depth is not negotiable. Discipline is not optional. The recognition that everything is Shiva does not mean that all approaches to Shiva are equally effective vehicles for the recognition.

What it means is that the recognition, when it comes, will shatter every boundary you thought separated you from other serious practitioners. It will make it impossible to look at a person who has genuinely descended into their own practice — whatever that practice is, whatever tradition carries it — and see anything other than a fellow traveler in the same territory.

The Shaivite and the Sufi who have each gone deep enough will recognize each other without needing to resolve their doctrinal differences. The Kashmir Shaivism practitioner and the twelve-step recovery devotee who has built a genuine relationship with a higher power will find, when they speak honestly about their experience, that they are describing the same country from different entry points.

This is not relativism. It is recognition. And recognition — Pratyabhijna — is precisely what Kashmir Shaivism says is the highest spiritual attainment.

The doctrine does not contradict the interspirituality. The doctrine demands it.

The Invitation

Shiva is not waiting for you to get your theology correct.

Shiva is not withholding recognition until you have found the right lineage, completed the right initiations, adopted the right vocabulary, or distanced yourself sufficiently from the traditions you were raised in or the ones you explored and found wanting.

Shiva is what you are made of. Shiva is what is reading these words. Shiva is the hunger that drove you to seek, the confusion that drove you to question, the despair that broke you open, and the something — you may not have a name for it yet — that has been quietly, persistently present through all of it.

The tribalism that fractures spiritual communities is not a theological problem. It is a recognition problem. It is what happens when people who have glimpsed the infinite retreat back into the finite comfort of the group that confirms their particular glimpse. When the ego, threatened by the vastness of what was seen, rushes back in and builds a fence around it.

The antidote is not more doctrine. It is more surrender. A deeper willingness to let the recognition complete itself — to follow it past the point where it is comfortable, past the point where it still serves the story of your particular tradition’s superiority, all the way to where it actually lands.

Which is everywhere.

Which is everything.

Which is the place where every serious seeker, from every tradition that has ever pointed toward the real, eventually arrives — and finds, to their astonishment, that the territory is full of people they were told were on the wrong path.

Shiva doesn’t care about your denomination.

Shiva is your denomination.

Shiva is all of them.

The question has never been which container holds the truth.

The question is whether you are willing to be dissolved by it.

Christopher Shaw works at the level of identity, nervous system, and embodied authority — the deeper architecture beneath behavior, performance, and strategy. His work serves founders, executives, couples, and leadership teams who are no longer interested in performing strength, managing image, or outsourcing their power, and are ready to stand in coherence.

With more than 18 years of experience in depth psychotherapy, somatic practice, and identity reconstruction, Christopher guides clients through the stabilization and reorganization of their inner architecture. In his work, masculinity and femininity, leadership, and relational presence are not techniques or personas — they are internal structures that reassert themselves through truth, integrity, and responsibility.

His process is initiatory by nature. It supports sovereignty, emotional steadiness under pressure, and the return to an authority that is inherent — not taught, borrowed, or inherited.

This is the path back to the Self that can actually lead.